“How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.”

Sonnet XXX from Fatal Interview (1931)
Context: Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.

Source: The Accidental Tourist

Source: Steppenwolf (1927), pp. 30-1
Context: I cannot understand nor share these joys, though they are within my reach, for which thousands of others strive. On the other hand, what happens to me in my rare hours of joy, what for me is bliss and life and ecstasy and exaltation, the world in general seeks at most in imagination; in life it finds it absurd. And in fact, if the world is right, if this music of the cafés, these mass enjoyments and these Americanised men who are pleased with so little are right, then I am wrong, I am crazy. I am in truth the Steppenwolf that I often call myself; that beast astray who finds neither home nor joy nor nourishment in a world that is strange and incomprehensible to him.

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book II, Chapter I, Sec. 3

Journal of the Unknown Scholar, entry for the Feast of Freia, 1000 NE
(27 October 2009)

"People Are Strange" on the album Strange Days (1967)

Source: The Virgin Suicides